Make Exchange Server Working More Easy and Secure

Lambert Butler
Updated On - 24 Jan 2019

Microsoft Exchange Server is a comprehensive, complex, and powerful messaging and collaborative utility whose proper maintenance is must for working easily and smoothly. If a problem occurs in MS Exchange Server then it becomes very difficult to resolve the issue. Therefore, it is better to take proper care about this complex yet highly beneficial software product rather than dealing with fatal Exchange issues. Following are few tips that help you effectively manage MS Exchange Server:

Use Microsoft Exchange Best Practices Analyzer (ExBPA): The Exchange Best Practices Analyzer helps you identify and resolve Exchange performance and configuration related issues. This tool gathers information about the health of Exchange Server from Active Directory, registry, and performance monitor. If the software found any health related issue then it automatically suggests the best solution to resolve that issue and to let you smoothly work with Exchange Server. We suggest you to execute this tool after installing Exchange Server. You can also regularly take advantage of this software to check the health of Exchange Server.

Confirm Storage Requirement: While working with Exchange Server, you should regularly confirm the available disk space to store email items. Unavailability of required disk space is a very common issue that occurs when disk space falls beyond the requirement. At that time, Exchange Server stops storing email items.

Periodically Reviews Defragmentation Operations: While defragmenting the Exchange database, you should review event logs to confirm that the defragmentation process is running smoothly. You can verify the successfulness or failure of defragmentation process by viewing various event IDs in event logs. Those IDs are- event ID 700 (recorded when defragmentation starts), event ID 701 (recorded when defragmentation process completes in allotted time), and event ID 704 (recorded when there is an interruption in the defragmentation process).

Review Mailbox Quotas: One of the common problem that Exchange users face is difficulty in send/receive operation. This generally happens when the users mailbox reaches allotted size limit. In that situation, you need to remove size restriction from the user mailbox or have to increase the mailbox size. However, if you keep a regular check on the mailbox size and try to keep it under 2GB then you will not face issues that occur due to increased mailbox size.

Implement Mailbox Quotas: When you install Exchange Server then a default size is allotted to every mailbox. Depending on your requirement, you can configure this default size limit to keep you away from issues that occur due to size limitations of mailbox. To configure mailbox size open the Exchange Management Console > Expand Server node > Select Mailbox container > Select the Mailbox database within the first storage group > Open its properties. Now, select the limits tab and configure the storage limit.

Configure Virtual Memory: When deploying Exchange Server, you must confirm that the computer system has sufficient amount of virtual memory. For example, in case of Exchange Server 2003 or 2007, RAM should be 8GB while for Exchange Server 2008 RAM should be 10GB.

Review SMTP Logs and Queues: Message failure is another common issue of Exchange users, which generally occurs when the message is stuck in the SMTP queue. Therefore, you should regularly review SMTP logs to find out that there is no error recorded in logs.

Execute Eseutil to Defrag the Database: Defragmentation process helps increasing the data access and retrieval speed. In other words, defragmentation helps improving the performance of Exchange Server. Microsoft provides eseutil.exe to let you manually defrag the Exchange database. You can use this utility with various available switches for successfully defragmenting the database.

Confirm Anti-virus and Anti-spam compatibility: You must ensure that Exchange Server is running fully compatible anti-virus and anti-spam software. If the anti-virus has compatibility issues then during update it may create problems.

Backup Exchange Database: You must regularly backup the Exchange database so that you do not need to face data loss due to corruption of the Exchange database file. The complete database backup ensures the data safety and saves you from Exchange disaster. You can use Exchange-aware backup mechanism to ensure up-to-date backup of Exchange database.

If you consider the tips mentioned above then you can smoothly work with Exchange Server. The tips help you stay away from Exchange disaster and other Exchange related issues. Kernel for Exchange Server helps you to rebuild the corrupted exchange databases to healthy and working databases. EDB to PST tool helps to retrieve exchange mailboxes and save them to new EDB and PST files. Additionally, the preview of mailbox items before saving is the best feature of the Exchange Recovery Tool.